New York’s elected officials and law-enforcement brass are currently debating whether to increase the headcount of the city’s police department with 1,000 new officers — an issue that seems to come up nearly every year.
Their final decision, which will be a part of the 2016 budget, is expected to arrive before the end of the month.
But many of their arguments are missing what some rank-and-file officers said is the heart of the matter: that, according to some estimates, several hundred of the city’s 34,500 officers do work that could be done by civilians for less money. The cops who perform these tasks, the officers told BuzzFeed News, are more likely to have problems and less likely to quit.
New York Police Department officers told BuzzFeed News they have a rich and varied slang to refer to colleagues who don’t do “real police work.” There’s “brooms”: sworn police officers who get paid to do janitorial work. There’s “house mice”: desk-bound cops who stay indoors all day, performing administrative duties like keeping track of the payroll. There’s “car guys,” in charge of maintaining a precinct’s vehicles.
And then there are the “zips,” also known as “zeroes”: cops who don’t really do anything, at least as far as anyone can tell.
“Some of these people have been inside so long that they can't go outside,” Graham Campbell, a former NYPD officer who now works as a risk consultant, told BuzzFeed News. “They're literally terrified.”
The debate around the proper size of the NYPD has been an issue since former Mayor Michael Bloomberg — who oversaw historic decreases in reported crimes — reduced the size of the force from its all-time high of 41,000 in 2002.
City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito has argued for adding 1,000 officers to the department, while Mayor Bill de Blasio has said the force’s current size of 34,500 is adequate. For his part, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton has indicated he would like to have more officers, but has not said exactly how many, or how he would deploy any extra cops. Each side is currently negotiating what the next fiscal year's budget will look like, and City Council has final approval.
The current discussion has become a strange political operetta, in which a progressive mayor has found himself at odds with his chosen police commissioner, and where a liberal Council speaker has sided with firebrand police unions.
People in city government have a more polite term to refer to the so-called house mice and the brooms — or rather, to their jobs. They call them “civilianizable” positions, because they could be filled by non-uniformed employees. Whenever the headcount question comes up, the issue of civilianization also arises. After all, why go through the trouble of recruiting and training 1,000 more officers when you could just redeploy the cops you already have?
A person familiar with Mark-Viverito’s thinking said the new cops would not just add to the force’s numbers but also help bring about a cultural change in the department. Rather than learning the aggressive policing model of the stop-and-frisk era — overseen by Bloomberg’s police chief, Ray Kelly — the person said new cops would be trained under the paradigm of "community policing," a law-enforcement philosophy that emphasizes earning the public's trust.
"More resources are essential for the NYPD to build strong working relationships with communities they protect and serve," Mark-Viverito told BuzzFeed News. "The City Council is committed to providing the NYPD the officers it needs to engage effective community policing strategies that work for and with New Yorkers to keep our city safe.”
Mayor de Blasio’s office and the NYPD did not respond to requests for comment.
There is no guarantee that any newly hired officers would actually do community policing. Where any cop is deployed depends entirely on Commissioner Bratton, who can unilaterally decide what to do with his force. Bratton has made a point of not specifying what he would do with any new officers, but on at least one occasion he has indicated he would like to have 500 more cops doing counter-terrorism — a very different task from walking a beat, which is the backbone of community policing.
It’s unclear how many NYPD officers spend their work hours in tasks that could be done by civilians — in part because the NYPD does not detail how it deploys its officers on any given day. But several current and former police officers and sources at City Council told BuzzFeed News that at least several hundred officers are currently doing work that could be done by civilians.
“Easily that number,” Campbell said when asked if there were at least 1,000 officers doing work other than policing.
The surplus of officers in non-policing positions is not new. Peter Vallone, who represented the Astoria section of Queens in the City Council between 2002 and 2013, recalled discussions when even the NYPD’s leadership agreed there were too many cops doing work that did not involve policing — and that was during a period of time when the department was larger than today.
“Back when we looked into this a few years ago, there were some 500 police officers that even [former Police Commissioner Ray] Kelly agreed were in positions where they could very easily be put in the street instead of doing that work in the precinct,” said Vallone, who chaired the City Council’s Public Safety Committee, which had oversight of the NYPD budget.
There have also been more recent efforts at civilianizing police jobs. During last year’s budget negotiations with the NYPD, for example, the City Council successfully pushed the NYPD to transfer 200 positions to employees who are not officers. Even after that push, however, many cops are still doing work that would not necessarily require a uniform. As of early 2015, there were at least 633 full-duty cops in positions that could be occupied by civilians, according to a City Council source.
Those officers can cost city taxpayers a lot of money. An NYPD officer with five and a half years of experience collects a base salary of nearly $91,000, regardless of whether he or she is assigned to an anti-crime plainclothes unit or to janitorial duty. On top of that, many officers receive significant overtime pay. In 2014, there were at least 20 police employees who collected more than $50,000 for after-hours work, the New York Daily News reported.
Still, civilianizing police jobs often proves to be an uphill battle, because it pits advocates of a leaner police department against an unlikely alliance of two of the most powerful political entities in the city — the NYPD management and its unions. The two entities often spar with each other, but whenever civilianization comes up they are quick to form a united front. The unions have a clear interest in getting new members and protecting those they already have. For their part, NYPD bosses often prefer working with sworn officers, whom they view as more disciplined than civilians.
“There are always going to be a number of positions where the NYPD thinks it should be a uniformed police officer, and where the union thinks it should be a union job,” Vallone said.
Still, some former officers argued there are good reasons to fill certain civilian positions with uniformed cops.
“There are places where you need a sworn police officer doing administrative work, because they are handling very sensitive information,” a former officer said. “Then you have officers who work as lawyers and analysts, but still earn the union salary. If you were to hire civilians to do those jobs, you’d probably have to pay them more. I mean, think of the guys who fly the helicopters!”
In any case, very few officers join the force with the intention of landing a civilian position, cop sources said. Zips and brooms are not born, but made. Some officers are given indoor assignments because they are older and approaching retirement. Others seek those positions because they have become disillusioned with the job.
"There's a lot of reasons why people run inside to become house mice or clerks, but one of those is that people perceive they are being burned by the administration," said a former NYPD officer who now works for a police department on the West Coast. "A lot of guys shut down because they don't feel they are being supported. If they feel they are not supported, they are going to do the bare minimum, and the people who were already doing the bare minimum will do even less."
More problematically, some officers are sent to desk-bound duties because they have shown themselves to be incapable of interacting with the public — some have been accused of excessive force, others simply don't do their jobs very well.
According to a City Council source, there are currently some 350 officers sitting indoors because they have been placed in restricted, modified, or limited duty — the official terms used to describe when an officer is asked to surrender his gun and badge because he or she is the target of an investigation or of disciplinary action.
That number, however, does not include every officer who is not on a policing detail, police sources said.
"Some of the cops currently in these [civilian] jobs shouldn't be out in the street," Campbell said. "Some of these cops need to get help or get fired. Not all, mind you, but some. Some of them should never have been cops to begin with, while others were decent cops who either had a bad call or a personal issue. And the job hides them instead of addressing it."
There's also a practice of "hiding" problem police officers in the bureaucracy, current and former city government sources said. The practice is alarmingly widespread, in part because union contracts make it very difficult to fire a police officer, even after proven misconduct. And the larger the police department gets, the easier it becomes to hide officers.
"There are unions involved, and these officers have due process rights," one of those sources said. "There are many cops who you wouldn’t want to be interacting with the public, but you can’t fire them."
Regardless of the reasons why an officer becomes a zip or a zero, once a cop gets assigned to indoor duty, they are less likely to quit. Paradoxically, the attrition rates for cops who are out in the street are much higher than those for cops in civilian duty, police sources said, citing anecdotal evidence.
"You are not losing the zips, except through retirement," Campbell said. "They are not quitting. They have an easy job with usually weekends and evenings free and a pension after 20 years. This is their meal ticket. You're going to lose the guys and gals in the trenches."
"There's people who got in the job because it was a paycheck, and who are only going to do the bare minimum, and if there's a position open that doesn't make them do anything, they will do that," the officer who now works on the West Coast said.
On a recent summer evening during National Police Week — a yearly memorial event for fallen law enforcement officers — several NYPD cops gathered at a sports bar in Washington, D.C., to watch the Rangers game and share a few beers.
In between rounds of Bud Light and toasts to their lost colleagues, the members of the service expressed bitterness about what they perceive as the unfairness of getting paid the same as the so-called zeroes.
"There's the zips, and then there's the good police," said one of the officers, who currently works in a high-crime precinct in Queens. “I’m out on the street, risking my ass, and they’re sitting in the station house, and we get paid the same.”